"In memory of the children of Europe who have to die of cold and hunger this Xmas", was written on the draft of a poster in the winter of 1945 by the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka who emigrated to London. He had 5000 copies printed at his own cost and posted in underground stations. In late autumn 1988 the Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, who emigrated to the Rhineland, mounted a series of five meter high photo prints with children's faces along a one hundred meter long wall between the cathedral of Cologne and the Museum Ludwig. He called the work Selection (Ninth November Night). It is a work of monstrous expression and painful effect. His title recalls the anniversary of the so-called Reichskristallnacht, through which Helnwein gives the children's portraits their almost overwhelmingly harrowing effect. As we were preparing his exhibition for the Lentos Art Museum together with Gottfried Helnwein, I was researching at the same time for a different project about Kokoschka. The story of the London posters was new to me. Unintentionally and unexpectedly the two artist lives blended into one another for a brief poignant moment. With a tremendous creative effort, ability to communicate, organizational experience, implementation energy and financial resources, both artists devoted themselves on a specific occasion to an appeal: Remember!

Gottfried Helnwein's Epiphany (Adoration of the Magi) is a strange takeoff on a traditional New Testament theme in art. The work depicts a Madonnalike mother displaying her baby to attentive Nazi officers, Painted in hyperrealist grisaille with chiaroscuro effects, the work resembles an old documentary photograph made huge. The eerie, sinister overtones are unmistakable. Who is this mother? What do these officers want with her and her child? What kind of official paper might the officer on the left hold in his hand and what might be its result? Helnwein, characteristically, presents us with an ambiguous, haunting image and leaves us to wonder about its meaning... With its huge size, hyperrealist style, and disturbing content, this unsettling work bestows a psychological anxiety accompanied by a strong magnetic pull. Confronting it, we tend to stare-entranced by both its beauty and its seductive, malevolent overtones...

California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco - Summary of reviews and texts.
'Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," at the Legion of Honor, deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers.
But the most haunting images may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" at the Legion, see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes.' Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, 17. November 2004
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September 1, 2000 - January 2, 2001
Third in a series of presentations from the Kent and Vicki Logan Collection of contemporary art, this exhibition focuses on works that depict toys, cartoon characters and childhood fantasies observed from a child's perspective. While many of the images in the exhibition are normally associated with childhood happiness, others implicate issues of violence in society and cultural identity. While adults tend to associate toys with happiness and enjoyment, they also can be very unsettling. Dolls can teach stereotypical gender or cultural identities, as David Levinthal reveals with his Barbie doll photographs. Cartoon characters can appear monstrous. The holes piercing Joyce Pensato's Minnie Mouse and the looming presence of Gottfried Helnwein's Mickey Mouse, for instance, evoke the brutality of animated cartoons.

The art of Gottfried Helnwein cannot be properly considered without surveying the terrain of modern and contemporary art from which it developed. To understand Helnwein is not just to see what movements and artists he embraced and was influenced by, but also what he rejected. For Helnwein, creativity is not a vocation but a mission. His art is the visual equivalent of a contact sport. It not only has put Helnwein at odds with much of the history of post-war art, but also has positioned him in the forefront of the highly regarded confrontationalist movements of contemporary art so active in America and Europe today.

Heather Whitmore Jain
Curatorial Associate, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Helnwein's "Mickey I" at the SFMOMA
...Other works in the exhibition present the dark side of cartoon characters. The prevailing narrative structure of many cartoons is a cycle of one's character's unrelenting attacks on another. Yet the violence of these scenarios is subverted and humor achieved by the lack of any permanent injury to the victim and the gleeful nonchalance of the adversary even during the most aggressive assault. Static representations of wounded or menacing cartoon characters can expose the violence and eliminate the humorous punch line. In Gottfried Helnwein's painting Mickey (plate 24), Mickey Mouse's physical features, which usually contribute to his appeal become a thin veneer of looming attack. Blown up to a monster scale and rendered in an austere gray palette, Mickey's smile is deceptive.

11. 6. 2008 – 31. 8. 2008, large gallery, Curator: Petr Nedoma
The exhibition Angels Sleeping is a thematic cross-section, predominantly of the painting work of the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein (born in Vienna in 1948). The five sections of the exhibition present the fundamental circuits of Helnwein’s work. The introduction comprises heads – faces, including the artist’s iconic self-portrait, painfully acute metaphors of the limits on freedom of expression in Austria in the 1970s and 80s.

Gottfried Helnwein: Inferno of the Innocents On view January 29 through April 24, 2011
November 30, 2010 – Sacramento, Calif. – The Crocker Art Museum will present a survey of the work of artist Gottfried Helnwein in the new exhibition "Gottfried Helnwein: Inferno of the Innocents," on view from January 29 through April 24, 2011. Organized by the Crocker, the exhibition features 70 major paintings and photographs from throughout Helnwein's career. Highlights include his iconic portraits of performer Marilyn Manson, works from his major recurring theme, "The Child," and his most recent series, "Disasters of War." "Inferno of the Innocents" is the first museum exhibition to examine Helnwein—who has been based in Los Angeles part-time for nearly 10 years—as a California artist.

Alexander Borovsky
Curator for Contemporary Art at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
THE HELNWEIN PASSION
I'll never forget the sensation I had at the unveiling of Gottfried Helnwein's "Kindskopf" in the Russian Museum. And not just because this enormous canvas (six metres in height, four in breadth), well-known from reproductions, seemed to operate in a whole new way in the real, quasi-monumental space of the museum's "Concrete Hall", originally intended for the demonstration of gigantic sculptural compositions. I realised that I was looking at the inner content of this innovative picture from a whole new point of view.

Helnwein Monograph, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg,
Text by Klaus Honnef
Curator for Contemporary Art at Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn
Helnwein - A Concept Artist before the Turn of the Millennium. Is it sheer coincidence that Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian artist, created a portrait of both the German and the American? Coincidence, that he captured Warhol as a disturbing spectre on photograph, but painted Beuys? And that he then photographed the painted portrait of Beuys in the hands of Arno Breker, Adolf Hitler's favourite sculptor? There are weighty reasons for considering Helnwein the legitimate heir to Beuys and Warhol.

It was to our good fortune that Gottfried Helnwein also strove to break away from the museum and gallery sector in order to communicate with a larger public. This appeared on a grand scale on the site between the cathedral and Museum Ludwig, and at a time of "photokina", with its hundreds of thousands of visitors. The 100 metre picture wall did not fail to hit its mark: it induced bewilderment as well as aggressiveness. After a few days numerous pictures had been slashed, one even stolen. Gottfried Helnwein saw the exhibition as a process which would continue and be reflected in later presentations. The pictures were not renewed, but patched up, so that this reminder of the persecution of Jewish people would bear the traces of a lack of insight and understanding in the present day.

The exhibition Angels Sleeping is a thematic cross-section, predominantly of the painting work of the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein (born in Vienna in 1948). The five sections of the exhibition present the fundamental circuits of Helnwein’s work.

THE OTHER MAINSTREAM:
This is a selection of dynamic works from the collection of Mikki and Stanley Weithorn, demonstrating their commitment to social and political issues and artists of color.
Although their collecting focuses on the contemporary, both well-known and emerging artists, selected historic pieces show the breadth of their interest and the roots of socially conscious work in the early 20th century. January 22 through April 23, 2005

January 13, 2005
Victoria H. Myhren Gallery
School of Art and Art History, University of Denver
Gwen F. Chanzit
An exhibition of works from the Denver Art Museum’s fractional and promised gift of contemporary art from the collection of Vicki and Kent Logan.
Helnwein’s subject matter involves the complexities of the human condition. His disturbing yet provocative images of physically and emotionally wounded children have been seen as metaphors for larger global issues. He portrays the innocence of adolescence against the backdrop of shameful historical events like the Holocaust to highlight the fragility of humanity in an unstable world. Like Wong from Asia and Sherman from the United States, Helnwein offers up dramatic scenarios featuring youthful protagonists that beg a viewer to complete the equation. The child’s face – painted in a realistic style yet eerily unreal – may allude to the uncertain (in limbo-like) quality of Helnwein’s own childhood. Helnwein is among a network of contemporary artists expressing visions that embrace and also transcend cultural nomenclature.

The Essl Collection of Contemporary Art
AUSTRIAN CONTEMPORARY ART AND POST-WAR PAINTING: THE ESSL COLLECTION
Group Show
The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey presents the exhibition Austrian Contemporary Art and Post-war Painting: The Essl Collection, a seminal encounter with the most commanding pictorial propositions engendered in the second half of the 2Oth century.
Gottfried Helnwein digresses from fleeting contemplation with his Self-portrait: the canvas on display prompts an immediate, impulsive reaction...

Gottfried Helnwein, known for his uneasy works, taps downtown for . . .
Some might think that Los Angeles -- its unrelenting sun, its one-step-away-from-reality perch -- is an incongruous place for someone like Helnwein. What he creates, regardless the medium -- watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture -- is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors...
The visceral reactions, he's come to realize, have as much to do with what's already in the viewers head as what he's created. "It's not my piece of canvas with tiny fractions of pigment," he explains. "The . . . art . . . has the potential of putting that finger on the spot, and it can trigger something that you'd rather not like to look at. But it's [already] in your own mind. That's what I think art can do."

Gottfried Helnwein's latest exhibition, "Face It", is the artist's first show in his native Austria since 1985. A retrospective of 40 works from the 1970s to the present, it is more shocking than the Royal Academy's infamous "Sensation" of 1997. Helnwein aims to disturb not with, say, an elephant-dung Madonna, as Chris Ofili did then, but with a far more controversial Virgin.

01. August 2001
While it is a painting, Epiphany is typical in its almost interchangeable use of photography and painting: both played their part in the achievement of the eventual, quasi-photographic image. He is a fine photographer, and his photographic portraits of Kilkenny children (enlarged to an enormous scale) form one strand of his festival exhibitions. The careful adaptation of existing imagery is another trait, and his references extend back through fine art history as well as history itself...
Artist Gottfried Helnwein does not tread lightly with his art - Nazis, mutilation and surgical instruments regularly crop up in his work. Aiden Dunne warns festival-goers what to expect.

Some of the most powerful images that deal with Nazism and Holocaust themes are by Anselm Kiefer and Helnwein, although, Kiefer’s work differs considerably from Helnwein’s in his concern with the effect of German aggression on the national psyche and the complexities of German cultural heritage. But Kiefer’s and Helnwein’s works are both informed by the personal experience of growing up in postwar German-speaking countries.
William Burroughs said that the American revolution begins in books and music, and political operatives implement the changes after the fact. To this maybe we can add art. And Helnwein’s art might have the capacity to instigate change by piercing the veil of political correctness to recapture the primitive gesture inherent in art.

Monday, August 9, 2004
Dark and detached, the art of Gottfried Helnwein demands a response. He now accepts that viewers may deface his works.
Gottfried Helnwein's exhibition at the Legion of Honor (San Francisco Fine Arts Museums), includes documentary pictures of an outdoor installation he did at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1988.
A long canvas mural of huge photographic portraits of children, titled "Selektion," the piece marked the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the November night in 1938 when the Nazis went on a rampage, attacking Jews and their property throughout Germany.

Mr. Helnwein, born after World War II and not a Jew, became aware during childhood of Austria's and Germany's active involvement in the hatred and atrocities of Nazism, and chose to speak out publicly and through his art, lest a country forget the past, forgive itself and repeat its errors.
1988, 50 years after the infamous "Kristallnacht Helnwein erected a 100-meter long wall of pictures in the city center of Cologne, between the Ludwig Museum and the Cathedral to commemorate this night. Helnwein's installation "Ninth November Night- Selektion" has been shown in many German cities, amongst them Berlin and Cologne but also in Russia, Switzeland, Japan and Ireland.

Jeanne Curran, Ph.D., Esq., Professor Emeritus of Sociology, CSUDH
Look at Helnwein's painting under Visual Sociology
Help us find visual, aural, metaphors that will let others understand the importance of engagement in this process. Look at Helnwein's painting under Visual Sociology. I left it up. What was Helnwein saying? Why was he willing to offend. Why do Beau and Michael want to shake us up? How are those things related? Why did one of my students make a giant box that when opened had a lovely smiling face inside that said "F^&* the Patriot Act"?? Isn't that a lot like what Helnwein and Kiefer and Beuys were doing? Maybe saying "wake up and look at what you're doing?

IMAGE & IMAGINATION, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2005
Petra Halkes
GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN’S AMERICAN PRAYER
A Fable in Pixels and Paint
Ever since I clicked on it, Gottfried Helnwein’s "American Prayer" (2000) has taken up residency in my mind. I began to discover a semiotic richness in this painting worthy of what W.J.T. Mitchell has called a "metapicture" - a "picture that [is] used to show what a picture is". Mitchell situates the concept of metapicture in "'iconology', the study of the general ﬁeld of images and their relation to discourse," thereby cutting across Greenbergian self-reflexivity into an expanded context that includes popular culture as well as contemporary art. In this wider cultural field, a metapicture does more than reflect on the nature of the picture itself and calls into question "the self-understanding of the observer". I will argue that "American Prayer" derives its theoretical relevance partly from its concealed hybridity, from the interplay between technological media and painting. In this work, the substitution of one medium by another reinforces the meaning that can be created from the iconographic substitution of the child by Pinocchio, and the replacement of the deity by Donald. In the end, Donald’s sideways glance at us indicates that this picture is really about us, the observers; it questions our own place in a cultural web of illusionism spun from the abiding human desire to overcome death.

Renowned Austrian-born artist, Gottfried Helnwein has committed himself and his art to reminding the world of the Holocaust. His exhibit, Ninth November Night, consists of 17 children's portraits displayed in commemoration of Kristallnacht. Ninth November Night was originally displayed in 1988 in Cologne, Germany. Days into the exhibit, the paintings were vandalized by neo-Nazis.
This exhibit will have its American premiere in Philadelphia in Spring, 2007; now, therefore be it RESOLVED, by the Council of the City of Philadelphia that the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht be commemorated, and that Gottfried Helnwein be honored for his artistic contributions.